"I use AI a lot to help scout out things or pose challenges and see where solutions are being marketed along those lines."
Jeffrey Ostrander is not new to his seat, and he is not new to the company either. He started at SLB 15 years ago, left, and came back to lead sourcing and supply chain for a business he already knew from the inside. Today he is the company's Head of North America Basin Supply Chain.
He has seen the organization as a newcomer learning the ropes and now sees it again as the person responsible for where it goes next. Few people get that vantage point twice, and it comes through in how plainly he talks about what needs to change.
THE INHERITANCE
The company itself just turned 100. With that history comes baggage, and Jeffrey says so plainly: a lot of policies and procedures that fit the time and now need to evolve.
His North America land basin is a nearly $5 billion business that operates differently from the rest of the world. The suppliers, the pace, and the scale are all their own. Much of his supply base, including phenomenal machine parts makers, is not sitting in front of a computer.
THE BET
In 2022, his team made a structural call. They separated the sourcing organization from supplier performance, then held them in mirrored category structures so a chemical spend sourcing lead works side by side with their supplier performance counterpart.
The knock-on effect was the real prize. People move left and right across the same categories, and then cross-commodity, co-developing expertise. That builds a talent pipeline for future sourcing and supply chain managers who have spent time in both seats.
THE AGENTIC QUESTION
Jeffrey is not sold on letting the reins off yet, and he is honest that this will change over time. Tail procurement is his easiest closed-loop case: defined guidelines, a set list of approved suppliers, and end to end execution.
Where he holds the line is commercial decision making and supplier selection. Open an agent up to pick new suppliers and you inherit risk. A supplier can commit to a price and lack the capacity or the lead time. And the harder question sits beyond supply chain entirely: when an agent makes the call, who is legally responsible for the purchase?
THE RECEIPT
What has worked: freight pay assurance excites him most. An invoice comes in, the agent checks it against tariff policy and billing, and if it is wrong the agent works directly with the submitter to fix it, across a thousand errors at once rather than one ticket at a time.
What has not been simple: data. Jeffrey rejects the idea that you must perfect data before starting, but he is clear that planning, execution, and resupply make data massively important, and the data issue will come back and haunt you. His answer was internal education for the whole population, not just the motivated few, so the change management story had a foundation.
